Pie Fight

How do politicians respond to the needs of the poor?

It's a trick question: they don't.

Larry Bartels of Princeton has recently studied the voting record of the Senate between 1989 and 1994--a time, note, when Democrats controlled Congress. He found that senators were very responsive to the preferences of the upper third of the income spectrum, somewhat less attentive to the middle third, and completely dismissive of the policy preferences of the poorest third. In one striking example, Bartels discovered that senators were likely to vote for a minimum wage increase only when their wealthier constituents favored it--the views of those directly affected by the hike had "no discernible impact."

Nor is this pattern limited to domestic policy. Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have found that the foreign policy views of the executive and legislative branches are primarily influenced by business leaders, policy experts--whose think tanks are often funded by businesses--and, to a lesser extent, organized labor. Jacobs and Page found that the views of the broader public have essentially zero impact on the government when it comes to tariffs, treaties, diplomacy, or military action.

Postrel

Here NYT "Economic Scene" columns look good.

Who says working class kids don't swot?

More from the interview with Learning to Labour's Paul Willis. (Note how Willis isn't actually catching the interviewer out: the latter refers not to middle class kids in the school, but to the school's middle class culture):

Tillekens: In the book, there is some permanent clash going on between the middle-class culture of the school on the one hand and the working class culture of the "lads" on the other and you yourself, so it seems, take a partisan view in this struggle.

Willis: Yes, well I'm not sure if the ear'oles in any sense are middle class. For me this is another misunderstanding of the book. Both the lads and ear'oles represent working class culture. So, at school, there were two working class roots at that point and as the subsequent history of the lads and ear'oles shows, in time many of them did change places, depending on the accidents of the labour market.

Learning to labour

Below the fold, an idea for my diss. One of the books that might influence it is Paul willis's Learning to labour. In trying to ascertain why, as Willis asks, working class kids let middle class kids get away with taking all the good jobs, one key idea may be the cultural production of meaning in everyday life. As Evans says in her observations of estate life in Bermondsey, working class people are often very proud of many aspects of working class life, and will seek to reproduce those aspects - eg a sense of close kinship and community, the ability to have a laugh, not taking oneself too seriously, and not buckling in to authority. These are good values. The problem is that their reproduction often conflicts with doing well in school, which is of course the ticket into middle class jobs.

Along these lines, it sounds as if Willis's more recent work might be useful:

In my recent book, I'm saying that schooling is a kind of early modernist formation of cultural transmission and there's a huge question about what it means for the subordinate class.

 

Rhetorically speaking

Kevin Drum defines the difference between cheap campaign rhetoric and serious campaign rhetoric:

No child should go without healthcare" is cheap rhetoric, something nobody disagrees with. "I think everyone over the age of 55 should be covered by Medicare" is serious rhetoric. It's not a 300-page white paper, but it clearly delineates a policy priority that not everyone else shares. "I think every man, woman, and child in the country should be covered by Medicare regardless of age" is really serious rhetoric.

Early years development and school/adult outcomes

The Centre for the wider benefits of learning has published a report entitled Development in the early years: its importance for school performance and adult outcomes. Abstract:

Early development of children’s intellectual, social and physical abilities has the potential to affect their long term achievement, beyond the initial introduction to the classroom, through their school lives and into adulthood. A greater understanding of the processes at work in these early years and their role in later success is therefore important to ensure that resources are appropriately targeted.

Past research has shown that early cognitive attainment is strongly related to later academic success. But we are also interested in the benefit that children gain from arriving at school with particular personal characteristics and the relationship which these may have to cognitive development. We also seek to explore the role of development (as opposed to innate capability) in the pre-school years. Data from the 1970 British Cohort Study is used to examine the importance of early measures of children’s cognitive ability and behavioural development for their subsequent school and labour market achievement.

Our results suggest that, of the various measures used in this study, the most powerful predictor of later academic and labour market success is the ability of children to copy basic designs. However, we do not ignore the influence of behavioural factors and highlight the particular importance of skills related to attention with respect to these outcomes.

The results clearly show that early development of both cognitive and behavioural skills have a role in subsequent achievement. In this respect, we believe that the findings in this report add to the debate on the appropriate balance between cognitive and non-cognitive skills at different ages and for different groups of children. In particular, failure to place sufficient emphasis on cognitive development may run counter to the interests of children from low SES groups. We believe that pedagogy should continue to address ways in which cognitive and non-cognitive abilities can support one another and how the interactions between these different groups of skills can best be harnessed for different groups of children.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

Education Sector publishes a report on the advantages - and lack thereof - of getting kids to spend more time in school:

while time certainly matters, it may not be the linchpin of school improvement. Of course it's a valuable resource for schools and yes, in good schools with quality teachers and strong curriculum, having more of it will lead to more good learning. But in schools with fewer experienced teachers, high turnover rates in staff and leadership, and a record of poor performance, it just doesn't sit right to keep kids in these schools longer. The kids in these schools-- generally the poorer kids who don't have their parents waiting at home to read to them or take them to private music lessons or language programs--do need more quality learning time to keep up with their peers and to get the education they deserve. But we must be careful not to assume that quantity matters as much as quality. It simply doesn't.

Dyslexia - the English disease?

If the following letter to today's Guardian Education is correct, I say we completely revamp English spelling now. Anything less is discriminatory, and an invitation to low skills that we all will have to pay for: 

Following your reports on how we educate children with special needs (Learning the hard way, January 16), should we stop to consider why there is almost no dyslexia in Finland or Italy, while here around 10% of the population is affected by it? Should we also investigate why bilingual speakers of English and Welsh are far less dyslexic in Welsh than in English?

I had no trouble at all learning to read and write Lithuanian, Russian and German. Becoming literate in English took me much more sustained effort. Helping dyslexic pupils to cope with their learning difficulty costs a great deal of money. Would it not be wiser to identify the root cause of their difficulties and tackle that?
Masha Bell
Author of Understanding English Spelling, Wareham, Dorset

Speaking of dyslexia and costs to society, this article cites a claim that more than half of prisoners are dyslexic - in contrast to Cambridge research that puts the figure at 5% - which is half Dyslexia Action's figure of 10% for the entire (free and unfree) population. A lot of agreement there, then.

 

The God Squad horns in on the action

Few things irritate me more than faith schools' ability to discriminate against non-Christians / non-Whatevers. Here's an interesting article about a selective, high-performing Liverpool school that the COE says is a church school; the school, however, says it wants nothing to do with the church, even though it has a daily act of Christian worship. The COE already controls 4,600 schools; does it need another?

To add to my anger, here's the COE on admissions:

the governors fear a creeping Anglicanisation that would change the school for ever. Only last week, the church sent guidance on admissions to all its 4,600 schools, requiring them to rank children in tiers - "at the heart of the church", "attached to the church" and "known to the church" - when allocating places in oversubscribed schools.

Alternatives to middle school

Via unfogged, the NYT looks at American school systems that, in response to well-documented slumps in performance for kids at middle school age, are trying alternative arrangements. For some, the best approch is to put the youngsters in wiht high schoolers; for others, it's to turn lower school into K-8.

Re the former, more common approach:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that students at Philadelphia’s established K-8 schools outperformed students at traditional middle schools, but that those schools had fewer poor and minority students and more experienced teachers, which could have largely explained the results.

In Philadelphia’s newer K-8s, which are more similar demographically to the city’s middle schools, students performed slightly better than at middle schools, but those advantages were not always statistically significant.

Re creating 6-12 schools, the key focus appears to be to give the principal and teachers more time to prepare the kids to succeed in life, preferably by getting into uni. A lot of this seems to be based on getting kids when they're young enough to successfully adapt to an ambitious, disciplined school ethos.

The 6th- through 12th-grade school is less common, and less studied. In New York City, where such schools have proliferated — 38 have opened since 2002 — the shift is being driven largely by nonprofit organizations that have helped start new, small schools. These schools are under pressure to show they can produce better results than traditional ones.

In many ways these schools were conceived less as a solution to the middle school problem than as solutions to the high school problem — that is, the problem of having just four years to work magic with woefully underprepared freshmen.

This is interesting:

Both 6-12 and K-8 schools eliminate one transition from students’ lives. Both also tend to have far fewer sixth- through eighth-grade students than the typical middle school — a difference that those who work with middle school students say cannot be underestimated.

“One middle school student is like three high school students in terms of their behavioral needs and the issues you’re confronted with,” said Fred Walsh, principal of the School for International Studies in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

In either case, I would agree that 11 is a challenging age to be making a transition from one sort of school to another - while on the other hand I can see the arguments for putting kids into ambitious settings younger.